Can you guess what the biggest cause of career failure is?

Here’s a hint: It is NOT a lack of credentials. Nor is it a lack of skills. Nor connections.

It’s not even a lack of “relevant experience” (whatever that means – the same person’s definition of relevant experience seems to shift depending on the day).

The biggest cause of career failure is none of these things.

The answer will probably surprise you. It surprised me…

TL;DR

Being an “outsider” is the biggest cause of career failure.

What exactly do I mean by this? Let me explain…

Now The Long Story

Over the past two decades in the business world, I spent my professional time leading, hiring, mentoring, coaching as well as competing at and around Fortune 100 firms. As a result, I’ve been – mostly – surrounded by success and successful people.

That made me develop a biassed perspective.

So… It came as quite a shock when I stepped outside of these circles of success, I found that regular people outside of these self proclaimed “elite” circles, were not that much different.

Many of the outsiders, who wanted to get in on these circles of success, were in fact, in no way deficient in ability, intelligence, or determination. They – unlike the fortunate few in the circles of success – were simply not “invited” or “brought” into it. That’s all.

Sure, some of the unfortunate outsiders were indeed inexperienced – they never led a big team or sat in a boardroom. Others lacked hefty connections, like an uncle that could get a meeting at the White House. And even others couldn’t produce an Ivy League diploma to save their lives.

But… Almost all of the so-called outsiders, I realized, could have been quite capable of doing any one of the high-value jobs me or my colleagues occupied.

So… Why didn’t they? That question became an obsession for me…

And after quite a bit of study, I found the answer!

The difference was that those outside circles of success were never exposed to how those in the circles of success got their start. They didn’t know how to get their first break. 

Those outside “the club” simply weren’t invited to play! 

How You Start Determines Everything

The harsh truth is: Unless you come from a family of ruling class bureaucrats or executives, or you find your way into an Ivy League school and end up with the right circle of friends, it is extremely unlikely for you to be exposed to how this high-value game is played. 

And make no mistake – the rules between the “wage earner worker bee” game and the high-value professional game are completely different.

The work is different; high-value work is more responsibility and bigger stakes, but I think, it is also work that feels a lot more meaningful. You get to control more of the work and yes, you get to have more of a say in the decisions.

The hours are radically different; it’s more intense responsibility and failure is never an answer, but you also get a lot of flexibility. I don’t ever recall a boss complaining about my tardy schedule, and looking back, a normal boss would have had a LOT to complain about…

The hiring process is also very different; HR people are kind of an afterthought and all their obtuse rules are pretty much ignored. You also get more job opportunities. Much more than you can handle, which leads you to quickly learn how to say “no”, which in turn helps you communicate greater value – it’s all a virtuous cycle.

The networking is also very VERY different; it’s not playing “natural sounding non needy well timed complimentary direct message” games and, at the end of the day, begging for coffee meetings on LinkedIn. It’s more like dining at invite only restaurants or going to underground nightclubs that you get to enter with a password – it’s actually quite fun and has very little to do with anything “professional”!

The whole thing is pretty much different. In fact, I would even argue that the whole thing is comically different. It is just like what teenagers and adolescents might imagine “making it” in the corporate world looks like – except with probably worse behavior than you would imagine.

A high-value job is, without a doubt, a much better and much more lucrative career path regardless of your specific field or profession.

So… The (literally) million dollar question is: How does one get started on acquiring a high-value job?

The Truth About Getting High-Value Jobs

Something I hear all too often is that professionals, especially early career professionals, believe they need a big network or a lot of years of experience before they can get a high-value job.

That is simply not true.

You do not need a lot of contacts, a fancy degree, or decades of experience in place to get started in this game. I know loner dropouts who became millionaires in the corporate world playing this game.

You also don’t have to “put your time in” and “work your way up”. (That’s no longer how it works anyway).

You don’t have to go back to school or break your back with 80 hour workweeks either. 

It’s much, MUCH simpler than that.

Mind my words though – simple, yes. Easy… Well… That depends…

First, you have to understand that, in order to get a high-value job, you need to have three requirements in place:

Requirement 1: You must have a marketable skill. 

There are plenty of high-value jobs. In fact, they are accelerating in growth.

That being said, this growth happens only for specific skills and only within specific domains of expertise.

Based on research from the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs as well as a number of academic institutions, we’ve compiled a list of these skills and disciplines as the 5 Core Skills and 7 High-Value disciplines.

If you want a high-value job, you need to be willing to develop competence in these areas.

No… That doesn’t mean you have to be an expert at them today. But you must be at least conversationally competent in these areas.

If you can crack this requirement, you can bypass a lot of the hassle. If not, the ONLY other reliable way for you to get a high-value job is nepotism (which is the subject of an upcoming article).

I recommend the marketable skills route anyway.

Requirement 2: You must be willing to get out there.

And I don’t mean be willing to send resumes or chase after headhunters for coffee meetings. 

I mean, you must be willing to establish some sort of a professional presence in the physical or the digital world – usually both. Like attending industry insider tequilla tastings or having your name attached to the credits of a video game or publishing an academic paper that ends up turning into a TED talk.

Developing your presence helps to develop your reputation… It helps you establish credibility. But… Also, it is only half of the puzzle… 

You could have the best track record, the most amazing portfolio, the greatest of all skills, the most charismatic personality – after having done all that, if you can’t get in front of someone who has the “chief decision power” to give you the opportunities you want; none of that will ever matter.

Yes, you must be willing to create some evidence in the world that you are a player in the game. But much MUCH more importantly, you have to be willing and able to get in front of the right people so that they see that evidence.

You have to “get out there”.

Requirement 3: You must want “it”.

It’s not enough to just want a job because you are frustrated with your current job or because you’re unemployed. You must want the job, almost entirely for the sake of the job itself.

At the very least, you must act like you want the job purely for the sake of the job.

Make no mistake – when it comes to high-value careers, it’s not only about the benefits of having the job. Sure the benefits are nice, but the work itself can be exceedingly rewarding. Be it discovering a new drug, leading a novel construction project or guiding investment decisions for billions of dollars; high-value work can be quite challenging. And that challenge – for a certain type of person – is extremely rewarding.

You must want that challenge. Want the responsibility. Want the impact. You must want “it” all.

Once you have these three mindsets in place (i.e. willing to develop marketable skills, willing to get in front of real decision makers, really want the challenge) – empowered by these mindsets – there are a lot of actions you can take as a beginner, to open the door to unprecedented opportunities.

Here’s our favorite 5:

1. Write

Writing about your profession is a great way to both get out there, and also develop expertise in high-value skills and disciplines. From a few articles on Medium all the way to a dozen books on Amazon, the sky’s the limit and your ambition the only guide when it comes to writing about your profession.

The best part is, once you’ve written on a subject, you are considered an industry insider, if not an expert. And that pays!

(Incidentally, many clients and students, approach us as a result of our writing.)

2. Attend Events

I’ve alluded to this… When people think of networking, they are thinking of events.

Of course, when outsiders think about events, they think about attending job fairs, or public trade shows, or after hours seminars about resumes hosted by recruiting firms filled with the desperate unemployed. All bad ideas!

When insiders think about networking, they think about attending high-profile industry talks, visiting trade shows and their afterparties, attending Christmas parties, hopping through happy hour meetings, even going to weddings!

Think about anything and everything where the people you want to be associated with “mingle”.

And remember, it’s both “what you know” and “who you know”. You have to mingle with people to know them.

3. Speak

Just like writing, speaking gives you an incredible reach. In fact, it’s even a little better than writing since speaking is a social activity that has networking baked into it.

If you can stomach public speaking, do it. It is one of the most powerful and effective ways to establish yourself as credible, and start new network relationships with other professionals from a position of authority.

Expert Tip: Make sure your speaking events have afterparties so you can mingle…

4. Host Events

Another level up from speaking is hosting an event. It’s a great way to create a lot of value for the attendees while also establishing yourself, not only as an authority, but also as a leader.

Let’s never forget that the vast majority of high-value jobs are leadership jobs. Which means, you need to leverage any and every opportunity to lead. This way, you can build a track record and a personal brand of leadership.

It might sound silly, and completely unprofessional but consider – the CEO of a local company might bring you in over a much more seasoned manager, because he experienced you “leading” people and “working the room” at the local art gallery where you hosted a few fundraisers. He never saw that other manager lead anything. His leadership is on paper, whereas your leadership and executive presence is experiential, real, concrete. The brain tends to prefer experiential, real, concrete over theoretical…

5. Lead a High-Value Project

In the business world, we tend not to give something for nothing. We tend to trade one thing for something else. “Quid pro quo”.

This is why, we never encourage our students to volunteer or to take free internships for the purpose of growing their careers. Sure, you can volunteer to your hearts content and that’s fine. But volunteering to show a track record of “relevant experience” – that’s not the way we do it, and that’s not the way it works. (Incidentally, having a free internship is no help toward getting a real job – for an internship to help you in getting picked by employers, it must be a >paid< internship)

Make no mistake: the most valuable skills in the professional world are learned, not by studying, but by doing. And while you could try to do this doing alone, or with a bunch of other inexperienced aspirants; it is much faster and much more effective to practice doing in an environment where you can receive the correct guidance.

After all, there are millions of wrong ways of getting experience, where you can waste tremendous time, learn horrible and damaging habits that are near impossible to break, and most importantly, class yourself out of the high-value club.

Incidentally, this is why high-value employers give a disproportionate amount of emphasis on where your last job was…

Think of it this way: There is a big difference between being a marketing manager at your corner store, and a marketing manager at Apple.

And the difference is not just brand recognition, it’s also technical…

You see… High-value employers want you to have learned the hard lessons about your profession on someone else’s dime. They don’t care if it’s your dime, or your corner store’s dime or Apple’s dime. They just don’t want it to be their dime.

The problem is… They also know that some lessons, the hard lessons that make or break millions, are never taught to the vast majority of people. They are not the types of lessons that corner stores encounter. They are not written in books or exposed on YouTube videos or blogs.

They are, for all practical purposes, insider trade secrets.

This is why, the experience high-value employers seek is NOT “3 years of marketing experience at whatever store”. Yes… Sure. They may write it as “3 years of marketing experience” on the job description, but what they are really saying is something like “the experience of seeing how a Fortune 500 company’s marketing department takes $30M and turns it into $90M, and having mastered how to deal with all the pitfalls that prevent the average company from doing the same”…

You can ONLY get that experience by being involved with the right projects or by being mentored by the right leaders. Period.

If you can get a job that gives you such experience – great! You can start elevating your paygrade.

For those who don’t have such a job and are still interested in improving themselves and gaining such experience, we do recommend taking on real world projects for skill development outside of full time employment. In fact, we even facilitate and fund some such projects (see Launch Your Career program).

But… I’m getting side-tracked.

The bottom line is this: If you’re just starting out… You need to learn how this game is actually played. And no single book on Amazon, no article on Reddit, no channel on YouTube, and God forbid – nothing you can find anywhere on Tiktok – will ever teach you what you actually need to start playing this game.

We have a system designed to sort and filter people into different “classes”, for lack of a better term. It includes one set of people while excluding another set. The closer you are to the center, the more “in on it” you are, the better you do.

If you are out of the circle of success, it’s near impossible to meet, connect with, or learn from those in the circle of success. The knowledge base and the skills associated with success can only be legitimately gained by working with such insiders.

This is why, being an “outsider” is the biggest cause of career failure.

That is… As long as you keep playing their game.

We – play a different game that works much better. And if you’re interested, we’ll teach you…